just matt

the fundamental rule of our era is that everything is political, except politics, which is entertainment

@pasta_nachos @jacobherbstman @culturecanceler this would be the primary utility of underground but that drives costs way up. an elevated line or brt on ashland/western and irving park/belmont would be a lot cheaper

@culturecanceler We talk a lot about a circle line but even a couple diagonals would be game changing

it's such a shame, because one of the things limiting the west side's growth today is that it's nearly impossible to get from the wealthy north side to the west efficiently

@alexdchi this last point i’ve made like 15 times. it was a huge error!

Which also speaks to Kat's inexperience with this district, because it has been a very open secret for the last several years than Jan considered retiring in 2022 and 2024, and any real primary challenge was certain to drive her into retirement rather than have to run a race.

honestly if Kat had waited 6 months to announce and spent that time building relationships with community leaders and orgs, the outcome of the race might have been different. i know why she didn't do that (its both a skill and a vibes issue) but thats for another time.

the thing that gets people on transit isn’t free fares it’s not having to check a schedule. a bus that costs $2 and comes every 6 minutes will outperform a free bus that comes every 30 minutes every single time. frequency is the product. the fare is a rounding error

@axiochrono gallego is basically the only example of politically moderate procedurally radical among all elected dems

Gallego might be the only guy in existence who simultaneously endorses Haley Stevens and Graham Platner.

good morning :)

@MattZeitlin he’s also in the national wrestling hall of fame! very few agronomists get that one

@MattZeitlin the nobel peace prize!

He also was hardly some obscure figure, he won just about every public honor you could imagine an agronomist winning

there is a credible argument to be made that one of the most important causes of american economic and cultural dominance over the 20th century was the ability of just about anyone to get an elite education for little money at their state’s flagship land-grant university

as a young man he attended a large public land-grant university (go gophers) for his ba, ma & phd, financed by his gov grants & his wages from the civilian conservation corps (a gov program). he is in every way a success of government programs & the democratization of opportunity

norman borlaug had a phd in genetics who spent nearly his entire life as an agricultural researcher in government-funded labs throughout the world. at no point was he a farmer, though he was born on one

Correct! Their movement was led by a world-historic con man and all of the foot soldiers were too dumb and cretinous to accomplish their aims! Their big immigration push was sunk by nice Minnesotans who stood up for their neighbors! Kash Patel is having too much fun flying his Swiss girlfriend around to persecute their political enemies. They had no foreign policy vision, so neocons happily filled the vacuum. They thought that sending Elon and a bunch of CS majors into the federal bureaucracy would demolish "The Cathedral," but these days the DOGE bros are getting deposed and Elon spends his hours commenting "Very Nice" on AI images of anime girls. Now the Democrats are going to sweep Congress, and spend the next two years hauling all of Trump's cronies in and raking them over hot coals. While this happens, the lame-duck president will be too occupied picking out trim for his ballroom to bother himself with their protection, or, for that matter, with tending to the political project he ostensibly set in motion. The movement will continue, all right, but it will be the purview of increasingly marginal dum-dums and grifters huffing the exhausted fumes of Trumpism as the bored public slowly drifts away. All of this happened for a simple reason: the far right doesn't know how anything works. If the movement had a real understanding of the mechanisms of government or the material basis for liberalism, maybe they would have had a shot at implementing durable right-wing authoritarianism in this country. Things certainly looked like they were trending in that direction on Jan 20, 2025. The wind was very much at their back! It didn't go that way, though, because the movement ran aground on the problem that Umberto Eco identified 30 years ago: "Fascist are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy." If you live in a dreamworld of conspiracy, you will spend all of your energy punching at shadows, and none of it landing haymakers. But they can't land the knockout blow because they can't identify what "the left" really is or what powers it. This is why this guy's schtick is so funny and so representative: the libertarian who always agrees with the authoritarian right. "Crush the left" - Hayek would be proud! It's emblematic of the pervasive self-delusion that has led them into the wilderness. If crushing the left was ever the goal of their leaders, they would have brought along at least a few serious people. But they didn't, and the movement will spend what remains of its stamina building the Big Beautiful Ballroom: MAGA's sarcophagus.

@yFactr ibuprofen/advil are minor mitigants for me but don’t really fix the problem :( plus i’m taking them near daily rn

@questionableway Seems terrible, I always travel with ibuprofen for this reason

having a migraine on an airplane is like a bottom 3 all time experience

@hsrgood it was so boring and calm

@questionableway That's better than last time

why are you flying from chicago to south bend?

@heatherpedia @CultySmother also have one of those

@CultySmother Punctuality gaps are pretty killer too.

My parents have a huge punctuality gap, but when it comes to airport arrivals, they're in line. My mom's frugality cancels out her general tardiness.

@ChiPencilPshr @Regimepup love to do the good work

@Regimepup Ultimately Biss, but I think he wanted to vote for Kat. He was just convinced by my and @questionableway’s arguments

I told my boyfriend this when he had a mini freak out over Biss being a Fetterman or Sinema type. Can you tell he’s a catastrophizer? He, like, can’t wrap his mind around how good we have it on the lakefront on the northside.

@hsrgood like an hour

@questionableway with how much time to spare

@joeywh1213 yes! just sautéed it in oil, ancho chile powder, paprika, cumin, garlic & coriander for like 30 min on low heat. may let it sit more next time

last night i made some soyrizo and put it on tacos and it was really good

@hsrgood yeah i always do

@questionableway Also did you make your flight